Mike Sandbothe

Witnessing the Meta-Philosophical Storm

Some Pragmatist Remarks

From a
pragmatist point of view a concept is useful if it makes a difference in our
coping with reality. A more specific understanding of pragmatism, as it has
been developed by philosophers like John Dewey and Richard Rorty, accentuates
possible political dimensions of our use of concepts. A concept from this point
of view is especially useful if it does not only help to cope with reality in a
general sense but furthermore helps to improve democracy. Rorty calls this type
of pragmatism „ethnocentric” because it refers to democratic practices as we
know them since the age of Enlightenment in the Western world. The ethnocentric
approach to improve these practices includes the hope to carefully and stepwise
extend democratic habits in a globalized world.

One of my
pragmatist suggestions is that juridical, scientific, religious, and
therapeutic uses of the term witness can contribute to both, the improvement of
our coping with reality in a general sense as well as – in specific cases – to
the improvement of democratic forms of communication. The main difference
between juridical as well as scientific uses on the one side and religious as
well as therapeutic uses on the other is that juridical and scientific uses in
most cases are related to a controversial debate about questions of the truth or
falsehood of statements that normally can be answered by using criteria of
inter-subjective consensus. These criteria are mostly missing in the religious
and therapeutic uses of the term. In these cases the witness is not able or
willing to make her experience explicit by using a language or a mode of
expression that invites other communication partners to endorse the statement
as an inter-subjectively shared consensus. Instead, in therapy and religion we
are quite often confronted with singular, idiosyncratic, sometimes even
traumatic experiences that transcend not only the articulation possibilities of
our common vocabularies but the faculties of our conscious awareness and our
voluntary memory as well.

Rorty’s
ethnocentric version of pragmatism is connected with an
anti-representationalist stance. From this point of view to use a concept as a
(mirroring or constructing) representation of reality does not appear as the
standard case but as the exceptional one. If we are willing to follow the
pragmatist in understanding ourselves in the Darwinian tradition as human
animals it seems more useful to describe ourselves as engaged actors or
participants than as neutral observers or spectators. To describe human beings
as intelligent animals means to understand them as being primarily engaged in
optimizing their living conditions. Representational knowledge about our selves
and our environment then appears as a function of our interest in transforming reality and not as the
result of a genuine activity of copying
or constructing it. This „pragmatist
turn” from a representationalist to a transformative understanding of the very
idea of a concept leads to a critical attitude regarding phenomenology and
epistemology.

Both disciplines
of philosophy presuppose the primacy of the spectator’s perspective over the
participant’s. For this reason epistemologists as well as phenomenologists
normally use a vocabulary that is based on a representationalist understanding
of concepts, knowledge, media, subjectivity, objectivity, and truth. This fact
nicely fits together with the circumstance that most of the questions in the
„Phenomenology and Epistemology” section of the conference topics paper
(„Witnessing Symposium – Some Topics and Related Questions”) appear to be
formulated in a representationalist terminology and in most cases refer to
merely theoretical problems. Arguing in favor or against realist and
anti-realist answers to questions like „What was first, the event or its
representation?” does quite seldom make a concrete, practical difference in our
coping with reality. For this reason my suggestion is either to re-formulate
some of these questions by using a pragmatist vocabulary or to substitute them
by problems that actually make a practical difference in our coping with
reality. The papers of Elihu Katz, John Durham Peters and Tamar Liebes („Why
the professional model of journalists as witnesses is no longer viable”) seem
to be quite good examples of a convincing change of subject and a pragmatist
politicization of the witness issue.

A systematic
attempt to solve (instead of dissolve or substitute) the topical problems of
the „Epistemology and Phenomenology” section has been made by Claudia Welz. In
her first paper („Three sessions as ,primary cluster’”) she takes almost all of
the questions serious and tries to find convincing philosophical answers. In
her second contribution („Witnessing Self-Transformation. Conscience,
Communication, and Co-Presence”) she furthermore develops an understanding of
phenomenology that introduces the very idea of „self-witnessing” as a basic
structure of subjectivity as such. This, in a certain way, is the other extreme
of the meta-philosophical options that are at stake in recent debates about the
very idea of „philosophy”. While the pragmatist is arguing in favor of a
therapeutic de-professionalization of academic philosophy and a
cultural-political de-philosophization of scientific and public discourse,
Claudia Welz and others are trying to re-invent professional philosophy as a
systematic discipline that is able to guide scientific and public discourse.
For this purpose Claudia Welz substitutes the classical epistemological concept
of the subject as neutral observer by a phenomenological concept of the subject
as holistically involved witness.

For the purposes
of this symposium I would like to suggest a strategic cooperation of the
phenomenological and the pragmatist attitude regarding philosophy. A common
goal for representatives of both meta-philosophical camps could be to develop a
Wittgensteinian analysis of the family resemblances between the different uses
of the word witness. That would mean, instead of beginning with a
philosophically clean definition of „the witness” we might agree upon starting
with collecting and interrelating the variety of uses of the term in different
disciplines and fields of reality. The distinction between juridical,
scientific, religious, and therapeutic uses of „witness” that has been
mentioned at the beginning of this paper could be a first step in this
direction. Another type of example is the ongoing debate about the question of
the relation between „passive”, „seeing” and „perceptive” aspects of witnessing
on the one side and „active”, „saying” and „communicative” aspects on the
other.

This controversy
can perhaps be mediated by substituting the oppositional terms „passive” and
„active” by distinctions of degrees. That may be different degrees of
communicability („idiosyncratic” versus „inter-subjectively explicable” or
„private” versus „public”) or it even could be degrees/areas/patterns of
neuronal activity. By using neuro-scientific instruments (as brain scanners
etc.) it actually might become achievable to develop a naturalist clarification
of what we have in mind when we talk about more „passive” and more „active”
modes of „interpretational” synthesis. But, of course, the debate about
possible substitutes can very quickly lead us back into the centre of the
meta-philosophical storm.